If you do not understand why your rating dropped down. As I found ratings in the contest are calculated in the next way. Suppose your rating is [math]R_1 [/math] and [math]N_1 [/math] was the quantity of people which gave you ratings. Then you have [math]S_1=R_1 N_1 [/math] of points. After it anyone give you [math]dS [/math] of points so you have [math]S_2=S_1+ dS [/math] of points and [math]N_2=N_1+1 [/math] is the common quantity of the people which gave you ratings. At the same time you will have [math]S_2=R_2 N_2 [/math] of points. From here, if you want to be R2 > R1 there must be: [math]S_2/ N_2>S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] (S_1+ dS) / (N_1+1) >S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] dS >S_1/ N_1 =R_1[/math] In other words if you want to increase rating of anyone you must give him more points [math]dS [/math] then the participant`s rating [math]R_1 [/math] was at the moment you rated him. From here it is seen that in the contest are special rules for ratings. And from here there are misunderstanding of some participants what is happened with their ratings. Moreover since community ratings are hided some participants do not sure how increase ratings of others and gives them maximum 10 points. But in the case the scale from 1 to 10 of points do not work, and some essays are overestimated and some essays are drop down. In my opinion it is a bad problem with this Contest rating process. I hope the FQXI community will change the rating process.

Sergey Fedosin

    Could very well be "sheet conductance", if you want to think of a black hole with zero temperature as a superconductor... Which might be more reasonable than taking the backwards approach in the paper. Will add this in for v2.0, with references re: extremal black holes.

    5 days later
    5 days later

    Perhaps it is not obvious that getting the "root" signals (a set of points on an (n-1)D shell) from all of the signals (a set of points on an nD ball) is a matter of ignoring noise and phase distortion. Came up with a toy "wavelet" reconstruction of the continuous signal to show how this "dimensional reduction" is straightforward and natural (even for toy models). Will add it in soon. I got a job in construction! Should be indoors. Bonus.

    Some discussion about the black hole entropy and gauge redundancy:

    `Introduction to Quantum Fields in Curved Spacetime and the Hawking Effect' by Ted Jacobson

    `How empty is the black hole interior?' by Lubos Motl

    `String Theory returns to symmetry' by Philip Gibbs (see comment about "gauge redundancy" of signal-states).

    `What Would Weyl Do?' by Blake Stephen Pollard

    I only include the following link because it talks about the "happyon". Uh huh:

    `Hairy quantum black holes' by Rhys Davies

    5 days later